I've been playing a bit of Soul Hackers tonight, and I'm really digging it.

It definitely feels like a late 90s Atlus game, and I'm okay with that.

The battle system doesn't feel that archaic, but having played old SMT games, I guess I'm used to it.

The only questions I have are about the magnetite.

Are there easy ways to raise it up?What happens if you run out of it? Does it stop dropping after a certain period in the game?

Magnetite will drop as long as you have demons active in your party, so it's often better to keep one or two active until you're coming up to boss fights. Easy ways to raise it up are to find really easy battles and auto them for magnetite. At some point in the game an optional dungeon opens up called the primate intelligence lab. It's full of large groups of easy enemies that will often give you drops of 1000 or more magnetite per win.

With a franchise like Shin Megami Tensei, it's not exactly a well known series that people see in stores and say "Oh, I'll just pick this up". It's not exactly a casual game. Most fans have already like me, imported the game, or is far more likely, downloaded it/emulated it by now.

I want to support it, but I'm not going to pay twice for a game that came out in English a year and a half ago.

With a franchise like Shin Megami Tensei, it's not exactly a well known series that people see in stores and say "Oh, I'll just pick this up". It's not exactly a casual game. Most fans have already like me, imported the game, or is far more likely, downloaded it/emulated it by now.

I want to support it, but I'm not going to pay twice for a game that came out in English a year and a half ago.

The most damning thing may well be the 3DS update coming out too, not just those factors alone. Certainly I'd rather they cut their losses and focused on getting that out as close to US release as possible rather than get the original game out NOW.

So am I correct in thinking it's best to build up the demon loyalty and fuse them as soon as possible?

I'm used to the "old fashioned" method of maxing them out before I fuse them but equipping demons one by one so you don't chew through Magnetite seems pretty slow.

You are correct. Everything about your demons is fixed this time around. They don't gain levels. Only maxing out loyalty is useful. I think maxing out loyalty allowed for more skills to transfer when fusing, but I have no proof of that, but I did notice that less skills were transferring, or none at all when I fused a demon without max loyalty.

Also, find out a demons personality and what skills they like to use and use that over and over again to max loyalty. If you get a Kind demon, have them block every turn to raise loyalty, or use buffs/heal. Sly demons like attack magic, and so on. It's pretty use to figure out once you get the hang of it. Some people found it annoying since sometimes don't match up with personality, but once you do max out their loyalty you can use whatever skills you want that they have.